Speakers

We've already secured the services of some of our alumni speakers from the last years and a few awesome "newbies" to the Wellington-based Flashcamp/Creative Camp events. More speakers (and their presentation topics/abstracts) will be added over time.

Working in the IT industry for the last 10 or so years Campbell has gathered a wide range of skills, but has focused his attention mostly on the Flash platform.

He now runs a consulting company, Ventego Creative, with fellow developer Kai Koenig and is involved in some of the most rapidly evolving areas of today's market. Campbell is also keen on open standards, creative solutions to difficult problems, the right tools for the job and having the occassional beer.

Tim Buntel is the Windows Azure Platform Product Manager for Microsoft Australia where he is responsible for key technologies in cloud computing. He has been involved with software product management for more than a decade at companies including Atlassian, Adobe, Macromedia, and Allaire where he was responsible for various developer platform products including Flex/Flash Builder and ColdFusion. Over the years, Tim has been an active participant in software product evangelism as a frequent author and keynote speaker at Adobe MAX and many other industry events worldwide. This is Tim's first ever trip to New Zealand.

Anselm Bradford is a lecturer in digital media at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT) in New Zealand, where he researches interactive media, web media, and visual communication. His experience with Internet-related development stretches back to 1996, when he hand-coded his first web site.

April Clark, owner of Nuance Consulting LLC in the United States, is a consultant and trainer for web and print publishing professionals. April is an Adobe Certified Instructor, an Adobe Community Professional and co-founder and co-chapter representative for the Cleveland InDesign User Group.

April specializes in helping graphic designers take advantage of the power of the entire Adobe® Creative Suite. She has been working in the field of graphic design since 1992. She has taught classes at Cleveland State University, Cuyahoga Community College and currently teaches continuing education classes at the Cleveland Institute of Art. She has spoken at events for Adobe all across the U.S. and in Toronto, Canada. This will be her first trip to New Zealand.

A natural ‘polymath’ – with a wide and varied skill-set – his pragmatic approach allows him to achieve realistic, results-focused outcomes. This includes helping companies kick-start their automation projects and software-developer team-building, resulting in project time-savings while still maintaining a disciplined approach.

Kris also possesses great people management skills – combined with his vast technical expertise, he excels at coaching and stimulating other developers. His skills as a teacher enable him to easily explain complex matters in plain language.

Greg Dove is an independent consultant/developer who has coded actionscript since flash version 4 and worked with the Flex framework since Flex 3. He has experience across a broad range of flash based application development, with a particular interest in advanced use of the flash drawing API.

Greg is also a core team member and contributor to the Degrafa open-source declarative graphics framework http://degrafa.org.

Robin Hilliard is founder and CTO of RocketBoots, an innovative technology company providing advisory, application development and hard science services to some of Australia's leading organisations. From mobile apps and robots to RIAs, publishing workflow and computer vision applications, RocketBoots is out to prove that great software can change the world.

Formerly with Allaire and Macromedia, Robin is an experienced software architect and Adobe Ambassador with a BSc in Computer Science and Pure Mathematics from Sydney University. He is a passionate advocate for common sense approaches to solving real world problems with technology, from initial engagement to requirements, agile methodologies and all kinds of testing.

Robin is the creator of several open source projects, a regular conference speaker and moonlights as the compare of CodeWar. He is based in Sydney, Australia.

Two decades ago, Matthew was building the first generation of multi-player online games. Today, he works as a Principal Consultant with the business-side of projects focussing on delivering awesome experiences. As one of the web industry’s thought leaders, Matthew has a reputation for innovation and leading edge strategic thinking through his unique multidisciplinary application of agile methods, information architecture and design thinking, as well as behavioural and cognitive psychology.

Over the last few years, Matthew has been responsible for delivering the experience design for the new CHOICE Magazine website, AHIA’s social business and digital strategy, and introducing agile methods to several Australian Federal Government agencies.

Matthew is best known as an Agilist, strategist, consultant and international speaker who lives by the axiom “the only power in knowledge is to share it”.

Mia is a strategic advisor with over 15 years experience within the information technology and healthcare marketing environment. Mia is a Partner in Zen Ex Machina Pty Ltd based in Canberra and Wellington and has a reputation for developing innovative strategies, targeted user-centric communications and design of ICT applications.

Kai is a Software Solutions Architect from Wellington. A few years ago he started a new venture providing professional services for Adobe’s rich client and enterprise technologies (and other web platforms) under the brand Ventego Creative. Kai holds a variety of Adobe certifications and is an Adobe Master Instructor for the Flex, ColdFusion, Connect and LiveCycle curriculum. He holds a Master of Science degree in Maths, Computer Science and Philosophy and always tries to find a way of digging deeper into the theories of language and parser construction.

Justin Mclean has more than 15 years experience in developing web based applications and over that time has worked on hundreds of web applications, database driven web sites, multimedia applications and semiconnected desktop applications.

Justin has managed his own consulting company Class Software for almost 15 years and has a long history with Adobe/Macromedia/Allaire products in particular ColdFusion (still has the 3 floppies it originally came on) and Flex (what's a floppy drive?). Justin is also a Adobe Community Champion, a certified Adobe trainer for ColdFusion and Flex, runs regular training courses and is an international conference speaker.

Developer, trainer, mentor, presenter and blogger, Andrew Muller has been involved with the production, development and education of Rich Internet Applications in Australia since 2002. Working with Flex since it's release in 2004 Andrew's development expertise with Adobe AIR applications has meant creating applications for the likes of Panasonic and Sony Music. Certified Adobe instructor for Flex, AIR, ColdFusion, Flash & Connect; Andrew is also both an Adobe Ambassador and a Adobe Community Champion.

Steve Nichols

Steve started his own business in 1990 providing design, training and consulting services to a variety of clients. Freelancing in corporate, advertising and design companies helped him develop his knowledge of a wide variety of industries.

Steve has worked on major design projects including the Amcor, Dairy Farmers and Westpac Investment Bank corporate identity projects (from designing the sides of trucks to fridges and letterheads). Steve has used and trained most of the major computer design applications from the early days of Ready, Set, Go! to PageMaker, XPress, Freehand, Illustrator, Photoshop and of course now InDesign.

He joined Adobe in early 2005 and is helping to spread the word with the release of the Creative Suite 5.5 as a Business Development Manager.

Mary is a Wellington-based photographer specialising in weddings but having also taken some very close up shots of a buffalo's face. That was sort of a career highlight, actually. Photoshop and Adobe Camera Raw tend to control her life when she's not behind the lens, and she has a few insights about how to put some of those shots that don't quite go the way you wanted into intensive care.

Diane loves people, and she has a passion for the web. Originally starting off in Social Science, she quickly discovered that humans and technology can be brought together - and she's pushing for user-friendly and inclusive websites ever since.

She specialises in content and IA, and goes completely crazy when someone suggests that web standards are not important. Diane is a director at Ventego Creative, an Adobe Certified Expert in Adobe Acrobat and runs the Wellington Creative Suite user group.

David ten Have is the CEO and co-founder of Ponoko. Ponoko is the creator of Personal Factory — the world's easiest making system. It's where you turn your design ideas into custom products using a global making network. Over 100,00 customer designed products have been made so far.

David leads Ponoko's vision of a digital factory in every home, business, and school using the Personal Factory platform and apps. Prior to founding Ponoko, David was co-founder of New Zealand's #1 design-led Microsoft web development firm, Provoke. He is also the co-founder Celsias, a web 2.0 solution to the climate change crisis.

An Adobe Certified Instructor and Developer, Richard has been in the multimedia and web application development field for more than 15 years. An Adobe MAX award winner, he has been involved in the development of many high profile projects for the Australian Army, Airservices Australia, Suncorp and Dominos Pizza, to name but a few.

Richard provides training in Adobe applications, as well as server and client side programming and technologies. He is also active in promoting Adobe products and services to the community, managing the Brisbane Flash Platform Group and Queensland Multimedia User Group.

Geoff Walker

Geoff Walker is a Wairarapa-based documentary photographer, Adobe Certified Expert in Lightroom, Adobe Community Professional and Adobe Partner/Influencer. If you need help with Lightroom or Photoshop, Geoff is a guru to reach out to as he moderates Adobe Forums, Online Help/Manuals and Lightroom-Forums while being involved in product development. Involved with Lightroom from before it was released and with Photoshop for more than 15 years Geoff has lots of in-depth knowledge and is happy to share it. As a sideline Geoff gets out taking pictures of hot air ballooning.

Jack founded Jack Yan & Associates in 1987, one of the world’s earliest virtual firms, and began his career in calligraphy and graphic design. He was the first digital typeface designer in New Zealand. He began experimenting with bitmap type in 1985 on a Commodore 64, before advancing to slightly better gear. His typefoundry began licensing its self-digitalized fonts for international distribution in the early 1990s and had them retailing online in 1995. With colleagues in that business, he co-founded the typeface designers’ advocacy group TypeRight, a Publish Impact Award winner in 1996. Between 1996 and 2010, he was the typography columnist for Desktop in Melbourne, and has just penned his first piece for Eye in London. At the turn of the century, he wrote for online magazine DZ3 in London and Visual Arts Trends in New York.

He has spent much of his career in digital media, designing digital magazines as early as 1990, and founding the online fashion title Lucire in 1997. He took Lucire into international print editions in the mid-2000s. At the same time, JY&A grew into brand consulting, an area in which Yan has a master’s degree from Victoria University of Wellington, bringing him to the attention of the Medinge Group think-tank in 2002. He later became a director of the Group. With his colleagues at Medinge, he was an author on Beyond Branding: How the New Values of Transparency and Integrity are Changing the World of Brands, edited by Nicholas Ind. He authored Typography and Branding in 2004, and was a contributor to Nishit Kumar and Anil Varma’s Nation Branding: Concepts and Country Perspectives in 2009. He has been a member of the Society of Publication Designers in New York and an active member of the Australian Graphic Designers’ Association. He is currently on the Board of Advisers of Nimcom, a new college in communications in Pune, India; is an editorial board reviewer for the Journal of Brand Management, for which he has written several times in the past decade; and has lectured and spoken in the United States, Sweden, France, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand.